Based on reports, the average Philippine internet speed has been on the rise since President Rodrigo R. Duterte took office.
In his first month in office, the average download speed for mobile and fixed broadband was only at 7.44 Mbps and 7.91 Mbps respectively. Since then, the average download speed for mobile and fixed broadband has increased to 14.73 Mbps or 97.98% and 18.66 Mbps or 135.90% respectively in April 2019.
During Duterte’s first year in office, Akamai, one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms, cited the Philippines as well as Thailand and China for leading the Asia Pacific region in terms of internet speed improvement with a 20% quarterly boost.
Akamai further gave a positive forecast for the Philippines’ state of the internet after President Duterte approved a plan to deploy a national broadband network at an estimated cost of $1.5 billion to $4.0 billion (77 billion to 200 billion pesos).
Consistent with Akamai’s forecast, the quarterly trend of Philippines’ average internet speed for both mobile and fixed broadband has been on an upward trend and has even doubled from third quarter of 2016 (7.77 Mbps for mobile and 8.40 Mbps for broadband) to first quarter of 2019 (14.71 Mbps for mobile and 19.31 for broadband) based on Speedtest® reports by Ookla®.
Way back 2015, under the Aquino administration, Philippines had the lowest average connection speed among surveyed Asia-Pacific countries at 2.5 Mbps.